Friday, March 8, 2019

1.08: Strategic Concessions

The entire region around Knossos became a warzone, host to a conflict unlike any the world would see for thousands of years. With the help of Tiamat and Kasios, Hekate was able to win the awe, fear, and love of a large portion of the human population. The humans who’d become disenchanted with Oranos’s rule and moreso with Kronos’s rule saw her as their great liberator. Kasios and Tiamat thrived on the carnage they created, but it was Hekate – as their master – who received the mortals’ worship, a large and dedicated cult forming under her.

Somehow she managed to control the two living weapons, keeping their violence much more restrained than it had been thousands of years ago on their home world. Kronos believed that Hekate commanded deeply engrained loyalty from the duo's service with Morgania millennia ago, but Prometheus suspected she somehow had actual leverage over them. Just from his brief encounter with the two, it seemed unlikely that they’d allow commitment to some ancient allegiance or even their life debt to Morgania to relegate them to the role of petty henchmen.

Kronos stood in a chamber behind his throneroom, surrounded by his advisors and commanders. Aether, though much weaker without his Legacy, could still manipulate light to some degree, and now used this power to create a topographic map of Knossos that floated in the air, like the displays on the Tartarus’s bridge. Nyx loomed from the shadows at the corner of the room, attending to the briefing while also remaining ever-vigilant for spies. She and Kronos had become close, to the point some were wondering whether their relationship was simply that of a king and his master of intelligence, or something more. Kronos’s brother, Oceanos carefully described the positioning of his naval ships and subaquatic infantry battalions around Knossos’s ports. Prometheus pretended that he was still studying the maps, hoping to delay the conversation that was about to take place.

“You’re the last of us with any real power, Prometheus,” Kronos said, “That’s not easy for me to say, but it’s the truth. I’m in your debt for respecting my claim to the throne, but your refusal to deal with these insurrectionists decisively is costing us dearly.”

“And what would you have of me, my King?” Prometheus scowled at him, “How should I use my power to bring an end to this? Do you think I can summon a volcano and dispatch it like some sort of assassin? Send balls of fire to search the wilderness for them?”

“If we could get the three of them in one place,” Kronos spoke of Hekate and her two lieutenants, “Somewhere remote, you could swallow them in a crater of ash and molten rock.”

“I can’t do that.”

“No, you won’t do that. Your insistence that using our powers somehow causes harm to the humans loyal to us is an interesting theory, but right now your idealism is somewhat eclipsed by the burning farmlands and sacked cities.”

“Even without considering the theoretical harm, if I did what you ask, ripped open the Earth without any of the rest of you having the power to mend the damage afterward, the results would be catastrophic. I could erase half of Crete from the map, and what was left would languish under a thick cloud of ash.”

“The alternative is to lose all of Crete to our forefather’s deviant cousins!”

“No, the alternative, your highness, is to be patient.”

“How can you counsel patience when Kasios is able to storm a city and take it single-handedly?! When Tiamat can sink one of Oceanos’s ships with practically no effort!”

“Sinking a ship or sacking a city doesn’t win a war,” Prometheus said, “Capturing ports and holding cities wins wars. With the technology we’ve repurposed to defend our cities, Kasios must exert himself considerably to take one at this point, and when he does succeed, he cannot move onto his next target without giving up the ground he’s just taken. Hekate’s cultists are simply too few to occupy the cities he storms, so we can always retreat before Kasios’s assault, fighting only long enough to tire him, and then clear out Hekate’s paltry occupation forces to retake the city as soon as he leaves it. Or troops are getting quite adept at fighting withdrawls, and Hekate’s followers are getting thin by numbers.”

“Prometheus speaks with great wisdom in this matter, brother,” Oceanos said, “At sea, the situation is much the same. Hekate has almost no ships in her service, leaving Tiamat alone to carry on their naval war. She can blockade a port single-handedly, or terrorize a shipping lane, but she cannot attack Malia and Agia Triada at the same time. If she lingers at one port, we move our trade to five others, and when she leaves to deal with one of those, we shift again, and again, until she exhausts herself.”

“You’re talking about a war of attrition,” Kronos said bitterly.

“Yes,” Prometheus said, “But that’s what we want. In a war of attrition, we have the advantage. Only a handful of Titans joined Hekate’s cause, and her human followers have been spending their lives quickly. In a war of attrition, the victor is the one who can endure greater losses, and for all practical purposes, our enemy has an army of three. They can't afford to lose one of them.”

“That still presumes,” Nyx interjected, “That we can ever defeat any of them on the battlefield. We can harass and frustrate them, but we’ve yet to come close to killing any of them. Without our legacies, we aren’t strong enough.”

"I think we need to consider," Kronos said, "Fighting fire with fire. Kasios and Tiamat weren't the only scientists-turned-war-criminals sealed away in Tartarus."

"Did anyone even survive Kasios's rampage?" Aether asked.

"Macaria says the three brothers, Arges, Bronte, and Steropes survived, among others," Kronos said.

"You're not considering waking them up to steal their Legacies, are you?" Prometheus asked.

"I am considering it," Kronos said, "It would give Nyx, Oceanos, and myself the means to defeat Hekate and her allies swiftly."

"Assuming any of the three of you are genetically compatible," Prometheus said, "and that would be extraordinarily unlikely. More likely you'll end up physically and mentally disfigured."

"In theory," Aether pointed out, "it's not as if anyone's ever tested that prediction. I mean, I'm not volunteering, but I'm just saying, technically we don't know..."

"There may be a safer solution," Oceanos said, "We could make a deal with them - send them to fight Hekate for us, and when they win, they're free to leave. I'd personally sail any of them wherever they want to go."

"A king who lets others win his battles for him is not a king for long," Kronos said, "If we send the brothers to war in our stead, then the people may wonder why the three of them are not in charge. If the brothers begin to wonder that, we ill find ourselves in a bad place, quickly."

"I don't approve of releasing more interplanetary felons on our island," Nyx said, "But if you're seriously considering it, I would point out that the three of them were imprisoned for experimenting with unethical weaponry."

"Unethical weaponry," Prometheus said, "That phrase seems redundant."

"The point is," Nyx said, "They were technological and engineering geniuses before they were exiled - their knowledge might tip the scales in our favor. There's no telling what sort of weapons they might be able to create for us."

"Provided we let the mad scientists rummage through Tartarus for parts, of course," Aether said, "What could go wrong with that?"

"Do you have an alternative, Aether?" Kronos asked.


“I may,” Prometheus said, “The reality is that we have to be able to hurt them, and doing that will mean putting ourselves at some degree of risk. Recruiting extremely powerful, ancient convicts from their hellscape prison to make weapons for us is not, technically, the worst possible approach to this problem, but I think we should instead consider arming the helots."

"The helots are already armed," Oceanos said, "Or hadn't you noticed?"

"They're armed with wood spears and bronze swords. That's adequate to fight Hekate's cultists, but not to fight Tiamat and Kasios."

"You want to pit the humans against the two most powerful titans on Crete?" Aether asked.

"They are expendable," Kronos said, "And as Prometheus said, this is a war of attrition."

"What do you actually have in mind, Prometheus?" Nyx said.

"Our ancestors settled here, partly, because the natives hadn’t access to the one thing that could hurt most of them,” Prometheus began to explain.


“Iron?” Oceanos said.


“Yes,” Prometheus nodded, “Our ancestors feared iron, and anything fashioned from it. Kasios and Tiamat, strong though they may be, are no less vulnerable to it.”


“That’s a double-edged sword,” Nyx said, “You may have the rare ability to handle iron safely, but the rest of us can barely come near it. You want to arm the helots with weapons we ourselves can’t even touch?”


Prometheus pulled out a knife with a silvery blade and handed it to Nyx. She took it cautiously but quickly warmed to the weapon. Prometheus explained, “Iron, alloyed with carbon and other elements, makes steel. As you can see, steel doesn’t burn us the way iron does, but I guarantee you it will cut you as if you were a mortal.”


“Why?” Aether asked curiously.


“It has to do with the way the electrons are moving in the outer orbitals of the iron atoms within the blade’s structure,” Prometheus said, “Temporarily demagnetizing iron with intense heat would also makes it safe for one of you to handle.” Aether was the only other person in the room capable of understanding half of that explanation.


“We can also cap the rams on our ships with iron or steel,” Oceanos stroked his blue beard, “A 60 ton spear with an iron head. That stands a chance of removing Tiamat from this war permanently.”


“Steel weapons for us and iron prows for the ships seems reasonable enough,” Kronos said.


“I agree, but for us to make real headway,” Prometheus continued, “We cannot continue to pit our human soldiers against Hekate’s human soldiers while we Titans exclusively brawl with Kasios and Tiamat. One of our great advantages lies in having the much larger number of humans at our disposal. If the humans can’t engage Kasios and Tiamat on the battlefield, we’re wasting one of our major advantages.”


“Arming our worshippers with weapons that pose a mortal danger to us seems unwise,” Oceanos said.


“Calling them 'worshippers' is putting it politely,” Kronos said, “many of the humans who joined Hekate did so because they hold the same position Prometheus has for years, that the humans are our slaves. As much as we like to play semantics, in this occasion we need to be honest with ourselves, and the fact is, arming our slaves with real weapons is a sure way to proceed to our own demise. We’d be lucky if the humans waited until after the war was over to turn on us.”


“What if,” Prometheus suggested, “We continued to bury the fact that iron can hurt us, and pushed the idea that Kasios, Tiamat, and Hekate are the only ones vulnerable.”


“That seems like a hard sell,” Aether said.


“If I take over the land war and lead the human infantry from the front, I can make sure they see that iron doesn’t harm me, and we can let the humans assume that the rest of you are immune to it as well.”


“You think the humans would fall for that?” Kronos asked.


Nyx was leaning towards the idea, “The ruse doesn’t have to last forever,” she said, “We can demilitarize once the war is over, disarm the humans, and then it won’t matter what they think. So long as they don’t figure out how to make the weapons themselves, of course.”


“And what do the rest of us do?” Kronos asked, “I don’t fancy the idea of putting my back to a line of steel-tipped spears.”.


“With or without the Legacy of Malinginui, you’re the ‘Sky-Father’ now,” Prometheus said, “Attack from the air. I’m terrible at shape shifting, but the rest of you can manage wings even without your legacies. Rain steel spears down on Hekate’s army. Seeing you lead an army of Titans from the air will inspire our troops and terrify Hekate’s cultists.”


Kronos sighed, “Very well, Prometheus. Consider it so ordered – iron or steel rams for Oceanos’s ships, steel spears for our Titans, and whatever weapons you deem necessary for your humans. If we can hem our enemies in, we can end this insurrection quickly.”

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